As background, there is a growing need to be able to provide remote health care to patients having a variety of medical conditions. To minimize costs, it is desirable to be able to provide home care for many such patients. Such home care requires periodic visits by health care providers such as nurses or health care aides. Due to financial and/or staffing issues, doctors and senior or supervisory nursing personnel cannot be used on a regular basis to make home visits. It would be desirable to provide a system which permits remote monitoring and interaction with patients from a central location in a way that permits doctors and senior nursing staff to actively participate in the home care of patients.
Remote robotic systems have been used in the medical field to permit remotely-located doctors to interact with patients and staff in a hospital environment. See, e.g., Wang et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,218,992. Such remote robotic systems, which comprise a mobile robot equipped with a camera and two-way communications capabilities, provide the remotely-located physician with the ability to interact within a hospital environment as if the physician were actually present.
Hospitals have justified the expense of such remote robotic systems because they permit physicians to see and visit (electronically) many more patients than otherwise would be possible, to interact with on-site hospital staff, and to provide expertise as needed. However, such remote robotic systems are expensive and the robots cannot routinely travel easily outside of a hospital environment. Even though the '992 patent describes the placement of a remote robotic system in a patient's home, such placement and use to monitor patients in their homes may be prohibitively expensive.
Accordingly, there remains a need in the medical field for a less expensive means of providing high quality home health care to patients in need of medical attention.